What made you want to do this solo project right now? Why not another SV project?
Elzhi: You know, as far as SV, we’re trying to get our business together on that end. So we’re kind of laying low until we get that stuff straightened out. And then on the other end, there was a project I did called Euro Pass that I took out on tour. Then boom, it got spread around on the Internet. It created such a buzz I felt like I had to strike while the iron was hot. That’s how The Preface came about.

Where were you coming from when you started putting it together?
When I started putting together The Preface, it was basically trying to showcase all the things I can do. As far as music goes, we’re living in a time when you have a lot of two-dimensional or one-dimensional artists that kind of only do one thing on the track, or sound a certain way, or rap a certain kind of way. I wanted to let people know I’m three-dimensional to where I was able to do more than just a girl song or a battle song. More like a deep concept joint, or a personal joint, or me just bragging, spitting some everyday lyrics. So it was just me giving a collage of things I can do.

The album is incredibly rooted in the D. How important was it for you to put your family on from Detroit?
That was very important because I feel like Detroit is still getting slept on. Besides like Eminem and his crew and Slum Village, that’s it in the eyes of people who don’t know what’s going on in the D. So I took it upon myself as my first real solo release—whether it would be on a big scale or classic and on a small scale—I still wanted people to know it was people I still ran with that have just as much talent as myself or any other cat you might have heard from the D. So I had to put on Fatt Father and Danny Brown and Guilty Simpson. Just to let people know there’s a lot of different flavors in the city.

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